Iran vs the United States: Talking Past Each Other

Iran and the United States continue the verbal barbs warning of this and that back and forth at each other. If I didn’t know it, it seems that both sides are speaking not to each other, but past each other to their own bases. Ahmadinejad stokes the nationalistic fervor that keeps the hardliners in power in Iran, and Bush does the same in the United States. Do both sides really want this to reach to blows?

It seems that what both sides need is to converse, not talk. Talking is not conversing. Talking is speaking without conversing. Can the United States president sit in an Icelandic estate and converse with the enemy of the “evil empire?” It has been done in the past……but by a man who wanted peace, and who showed it through his actions, not just his words.